World Philosophy Atlas
Journeys of Ideas
How ideas and texts travelled between places, and what became of them on the way: translated, argued over, taught again in another language.
Each journey follows one idea or body of texts from place to place. Every step says what passed on and how it changed, with a source you can check.
Every journey on one outline. Open one to follow it step by step.
Aristotle's long journey: Athens → Alexandria → Baghdad → Isfahan → Marrakesh → Paris
Athens → Alexandria → Baghdad → Isfahan → Marrakesh → Paris
Aristotle's school treatises travelled from Greek into Arabic and then into Latin over some fifteen centuries. At each stop readers did more than copy them: they commented, criticised and rebuilt them, so that the Aristotle who reached the universities of thirteenth-century Paris came wrapped in late antique, Arabic and Andalusian argument.
From Sarnath to Mount Hiei: Buddhist philosophy travels east
Varanasi → Nalanda → Chang'an → Kyoto → Mount Hiei → Kamakura
The Buddha's teaching moved from the Ganges valley through the monastic university of Nalanda to Tang Chang'an and on to Japan. Each crossing meant translation into new languages and new schools: Indian Yogācāra became Chinese Faxiang; esoteric Zhenyan became Kūkai's Shingon; Dōgen, first ordained in the Tendai school on Mount Hiei, founded Sōtō Zen; and in the twentieth century D. T. Suzuki carried Zen to readers far beyond Japan.
Principle and mind: Neo-Confucianism from Luoyang to Andong and Edo
Luoyang → Mount Lu → Andong → Tokyo
The Neo-Confucian 'learning of principle', shaped by the Cheng brothers and synthesised by Zhu Xi, became the shared intellectual language of East Asia. In Korea it produced the Four-Seven debate and rival schools; in Tokugawa Japan it won official support and then provoked the 'Ancient Learning' reaction of Itō Jinsai and Ogyū Sorai.
Phenomenology's travels: Vienna → Freiburg → Paris → Kyoto
Vienna → Freiburg im Breisgau → Paris → Kyoto
A method for describing experience as it is lived began in Brentano's Vienna lecture room, became a movement in Husserl's and Heidegger's Freiburg, and was carried by students to France and Japan. In Paris it became existentialism and an ethics of the other person; in Kyoto it met Zen and Pure Land Buddhism.
Négritude and anticolonial thought: Paris → Fort-de-France → Algeria → Accra
Paris → Fort-de-France → Algiers → Accra
Students from the French colonies created Négritude in Paris in the 1930s; Aimé Césaire carried it home to Martinique, where his pupil Frantz Fanon first met it; Fanon took a sharper anticolonial philosophy into the Algerian war and on to Ghana, where the Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois spent his last years.